Skype’s Incredible Rise, in One Image

Telecommunications research company TeleGeography keeps a close eye on the global telecom system, and for years has documented the shift to Internet-based calling via Skype, even as traditional mobile and landline networks also keep growing.

In 2013 alone, Skype carried an estimated 214 billion minutes of international “on-net” calls (from one Skype app to another, rather than calls made from Skype to a regular phone), TeleGeography said in a report released today. That’s up 36% on the previous year.

More importantly, Skype’s traffic was almost 40% the size of the entire conventional international telecom market — that is, for every ten minutes spent making international phone calls on every mobile and landline network in the entire world, four minutes are spent on Skype. The service is gradually eating its industry.

And in growth terms, it now far outpaces the combined expansion of the global telecom industry. Here’s the growth in calling minutes each year from 2005-13:

TeleGeography

Skype’s growth of 54 billion minutes is a full 50% higher than the growth of the rest of the international calling industry combined. And as TeleGeography points out, that’s particularly impressive in light of how the market is changing:

Such strong traffic growth more than 10 years after Skype’s launch is particularly impressive in light of the growing acceptance of a wide range of alternative over-the-top (OTT) communications applications for mobile devices. OTT messaging applications are among the most popular mobile apps, and several, including Skype, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Viber, Line, Tango, Google Hangouts, and Samsung’s ChatOn, have been installed more than 100 million times from Google’s online Play app store, alone.

The numbers are impressive. But the incumbent system of so-called public switched telephone networks (PSTNs) is still a far larger and more comprehensive platform than anything the Internet has built so far. “The PSTN will not disappear anytime soon,” said TeleGeography analyst Stephan Beckert in today’s release. “While Facebook has approximately 1.2 billion monthly users, at year-end 2013, the PSTN connected to just over 8 billion fixed and mobile subscribers worldwide.”

Update – TeleGeography’s figures are referring to international phone calls and Skype traffic. An earlier version of this post referred to the total volume of phone traffic.